 |
|
Why is the National Review promoting as one of its "Editor's Picks" a book on Islam by the spokesman for the indicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic? Are they crazy? If you will remember, Karadzic is charged with genocide of Bosnia's Muslims.
In this June 5, 1995 interview with the BBC, a month before 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the UN "safe haven" of Srebrenica were massacred by Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic with Karadzic's blessing, Srdja Trifkovic defends Mladic's having taken international peacekeepers in Bosnia hostage:
BBC: You sit in the outside world here, a long way from your home country, and you see what's going on. You talk to General Mladic on the phone. Don't people like you want to say to him, or shouldn't you say to him: "look, the way to do this is not by taking hostages"?ST: What I personally think is neither here nor there. What I am trying to do here is try and provide an analytical background to this situation, and ingredients for its resolution; and I think that if and when the U.N. realise that its treatment of the Serbs over the past few weeks in particular - under American pressure - reflected more this Albrightesque strain of gung-ho diplomacy of dropping bombs, then we may be on to a good thing.
Here, Trifkovic defends Mladic's not giving the Red Cross access to the UN peacekeepers he has taken hostage:
BBC: [ .... ] Why do you think General Mladic will not allow the Red Cross access to people who have been taken and who are being held hostage at risk to their lives?
ST: I think it is in reaction to what they perceive as an attempt by "the international community" to resolve this one through Milosevic, and not through a dialogue with Pale.
As my friend Andras Riedlmayer writes in horror:
Will National Review subscribers who buy this outstanding EDITOR'S PICK also get a special discount offer for next month's NR Book Service selection of the best in conservative books, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, perhaps ? Will Srdja Trifkovic's book also be distributed to GOP delegates in Madison Square Garden this week ?
What is wrong with these people??
So is National Review known to be on the side of the war criminals in these matters? Call me naive, but I had no idea.
Update: Atrios draws some magnificent comments in a link to this post, check them out here. Among them: "It turns out genocide plays well with the base..."; "No doubt they just overlooked the purchases of Mein Kampf," and so on.
The writers and editors at National Review should be truly ashamed and dump this genocide apologist from their Editor's Picks. This is much worse than Peter Hannaford lobbying for the Nazi-friendly Austrian Freedom Party in my book; Trifkovic was defending the Bosnian Serb genocide of the Bosnian Muslims in real time of the genocide occurring just a decade ago. As my friend E says, of whomever decided to put this guy's book on their list, "May their children not get into good schools."